Missing From Obama Health-Care Anniversary: Obama

President Barack Obama’s health-care law turns two years old Friday, and his reelection campaign is celebrating with mailers and phone calls to supporters. The White House posted video testimony of people who have been helped. The secretary of Health and Human Services is traveling the country to tout the benefits. And the campaign formed a group, Nurses for Obama, to make the case in communities across the country.

There’s just one thing missing: Mr. Obama. He isn’t making any public appearances to talk about the law, showing up only in packaged videos like this documentary-style campaign video, which recounts the story of the law’s passage. In it, the president explains why he pursued the matter. “I was not going to allow another decade to pass by where we kicked down the road because it was politically convenient to do,” he said.

With the law still unpopular with many Americans, the White House has concluded that it is virtually impossible to change negative public opinions, particularly if Mr. Obama is front and center, a senior administration official said.

Associated Press

In this March 23, 2010 file photo, President Barack Obama signs the health-care bill, in the East Room of the White House in Washington.

Instead, the White House wants to spotlight health-care officials and regular Americans who have benefited from the law, in hopes of draining politics from the issue. Involving Mr. Obama makes the matter more political and is therefore counterproductive to the long-term goal of boosting public support for the overhaul, the official said.

“Barack Obama is not a good spokesman. He actually polarizes the debate,” said one person close to the White House who supports the health law. “The best people are doctors and nurses and normal people.”

Two years ago, the White House had hoped that support for the measure would rise as the focus turned from the politics and legislative deal-making to implementation of early, popular provisions. But the focus never turned away from politics, as Republicans continued to campaign against the law through the 2010 midterm elections and beyond. At the same time, some of the early provisions ran into trouble in the implementation.

In the last two years, critics ran $204 million worth of negative TV ads about the health law, vs. $58 million in ads by supporters, according to data released Thursday by the nonpartisan Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political ad spending.

Now administration officials are looking ahead to 2014, when the bulk of the law takes effect, particularly the health care exchanges and subsidies aimed at covering the uninsured. “We accept the fact that until the full benefits of the bill are implemented, it will be hard to move the opinion of some people,” the senior administration official said.

At the same time, White House officials are wary of doing anything ahead of next week’s Supreme Court hearings that could be read as trying to influence the justices. The White House fears that even if events were tied to the second anniversary, they would be framed by the media as related to the court hearings, where the individual mandate to buy insurance—the heart of the law—is being challenged.

“If you talk to a Supreme Court expert, the justices don’t want to feel like they’re being influenced politically,” said one Obama adviser. “Having the president weigh in on something that’s coming before them probably does that.”

But Mr. Obama couldn’t avoid the issue altogether. In an interview this week with Marketplace, a public radio program, he said the lawsuits were “basically uniformly filed by Republicans who wanted to score political points.” And he predicted that support would grow as more people learn of the benefits.

“Over time, as it gets implemented, I think people will say this was the right thing to do,” he said.

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